


Riddance

by rohpsohpic



Series: 8-letter word that starts with R and ends with -ance [1]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Angst and Humor, But mostly angst, Emotional Baggage, Lee Jihoon | Woozi-centric, M/M, Music, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 16:51:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17207225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohpsohpic/pseuds/rohpsohpic
Summary: There's this box.There's always this box.





	Riddance

There’s this box.

Jihoon doesn’t look at it as it’s filled. Reams of paper, bedecked in a cross between tempered print and gorgeous cursive, fall in with heavy thumps that could have been satisfying if it wasn’t for the way the sounds made his ears block like a plane climbing fast, too fast. It rings in the apartment and idly, he wishes he had more soft things inside his abode, things to soften the blow and muffle the noise and soundproof his heart. Instead, it has turned into an echo chamber for the breaking of not only his heart, but all the papers that had cut their way into it, all the songs that he thought would stay. Gone. The paper has to go. He can’t think the tunes. He can’t even look at them.

He takes the huge blocks of paper that fill up all the space between his thumbs and fingers, feeling their mocking heft in the brackets of his purlicues, and it doesn’t feel like it would be such a direct defiance physics to rip them apart with his bare hands. He doesn’t. He doesn’t even try, just slots them into the box one great pile after another, a cardboard chute that he doesn’t bother looking down.

Jihoon doesn’t look. He can’t look.

There’s this box.

Jihoon pulled it out of a forgotten closet and bent it into the shape of one—box—and shoved the remnants of his heart into it and waited for his ears to pop. The next day, he walks into work with tighter lips and singing papercuts.

Seungcheol accosts him during their lunch break. He has been glancing at Jihoon’s cubicle with a concerned look on his face all morning, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed, but Jihoon just isn’t up for dealing with it right now, and Seungcheol has never been that great at taking a hint. Seungcheol stares into his coffee for an absurdly long time. There’s a frown. Then he says, “You look like shit.”

Jihoon says, “I feel like shit.”

Seungcheol asks why.

“Breakups will do that to you.”

Jihoon peels his tangerine. It tastes normal. It’s just his tongue that is bitter.

*

There’s this box.

Jihoon pushes it into the very back of his closet and closes the door and leaves it to the chasmic darkness of cold storage. In the alcove of his mind, it isn’t so easily forgotten. His thoughts walk past it when he least expects it, a cache that he will not retrieve. It’s not just the box, but everything that it stands for, all the nights that Jihoon spent waxing poetic and working on melodies that ran nowhere, harmonies that disappeared, a rhapsodized and sentimentalized idea of a person that slipped out from under his pen in a nebulous stream. An entire relationship amounts to a cardboard box of unfinished dreams shoved into oblivion.

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget.

Like right now, when he is pulling Soonyoung into his apartment by the intoxicating bite of his lips and the yielding collar of his shirt, stumbling backward through the front door and accidentally kicking his keys under the couch. Irrelevant. No bother. A second later, they’re on that couch, not kissing, that’s not the right word, but pulling and biting. It’s hot and physical and greedy and everything that Jihoon would normally scoff at. He’s beyond scoffing now, though, has been ever since he took Seungcheol’s well-meaning advice to “get out more” perhaps a lot less innocently than Seungcheol had had in mind. Jihoon has never been the laid-back type. Sitting around is just an invitation for his mind to wander places it shouldn’t. He needs something to do. He needs it.

Jihoon rehearses it like a mantra. He needs it, he needs it, he needs it.

Soonyoung sinks one hand into the crevice of the couch for purchase, his thumb catching on Jihoon’s hair, and makes a startled noise. Before Jihoon can process it, Soonyoung disconnects their mouths to announce, “There’s a coin in your couch.”

“Shut up,” Jihoon says, feeling a little heady and more than a little annoyed at the sudden loss of heat. His rhythm is broken, and every measure the pause is drawn out is a measure too long. “No one even uses coins anymore, dumbass.”

“I’m older than you,” Soonyoung quips. He knows better than to take the insult to heart.

“Are you?”

Soonyoung’s smile turns crafty as he holds up the coin with two fingers. “Wanna bet?”

It’s a penny.

Heads.

If he wasn’t so suddenly, inexorably cold, Jihoon might have laughed at the irony. Soonyoung grasps the change in mood a few moments later. The ultimate turn-off, small enough to hide in the cracks of his home, in the lines of his palm, in the hundredth of his own stupid heart.

There’s this box.

In short, Jihoon does not want to bet.

*

There’s this box.

Jihoon pulls it out once in a while to flip through the pages and pages of abandoned, half-baked sheet music and wonder why he ever cared while pretending that he never cared.

“I’m not like other people who remember their exes through material items,” he explains on impulse one day while fixing tea for Seungcheol like a proper host. It’s rare that he has guests. Somehow, Seungcheol has made it work without making Jihoon kick him out so far despite the unexpected visit. If that means something, Jihoon still has enough of a bearing on himself to push it aside like he does with most other things. Jihoon keeps his eyes down. Tea. That Seungcheol will drink anything with caffeine in it. “I don’t keep pictures or toothbrushes or articles of clothing. I don’t smell my blankets or towels or pillows hoping to catch some forgotten-but-familiar scent. I do my cleaning. I wash my sheets. I go to the laundromat.”

Seungcheol listens with an uncharacteristic seriousness.

He looks at Jihoon and says, with a thoughtfulness that Jihoon kind of wants to unsee in his happy-go-lucky colleague, “I know. But you’re still hiding something. Or remembering it, at least.”

There’s this box.

Jihoon holds his breath until Seungcheol passes with a sip of tea that can’t be anywhere near consumable temperature yet but is evidently good enough, sighing forlornly and funnily, “It would be so much easier if you had something to burn. Metaphorically.”

Jihoon doesn’t answer to Seungcheol’s attempt at humor, but some part of him, the one that’s not back in his too-empty living room desperately stuffing the written sum of his relationship into a box and hiding it from no one but himself, the one that’s not finding the irony in every meaningless bauble, agrees just a little.

He looks at the closet that shelters so many unsaid words and wasted songs, the skeleton of his relationship, and the thought of throwing it out once and for all, of burning the bridge that binds him, sends a raw undercurrent of malaise through his body. He clutches at the kitchen counter as Seungcheol busies himself with his drink, a stone-cold grip for shore that lasts a long, invisible, nerve-wracking second. The dread stays, but the wave dissolves, and after a pensive beat, Jihoon pours a cup of tea and takes a sip. He doesn’t join Seungcheol on the opposite end of the kitchen, but he doesn’t pull away from where he is standing, either. There’s an ache inside him that burning tea can’t quite soothe, but maybe, for now, it’s enough.

They drink their tea, and it feels like a truce.

*

There’s this box.

There’s always this box.

**Author's Note:**

> (A few hours ago, I heard that Good Riddance Day is a Times Square holiday that happens on this day where people get rid of their baggage, and this came out. Stranger-to-stranger here, remember to look after yourself, too, okay? Physically, materially, and emotionally. Take care out there.)


End file.
